As mentioned at the end of the last post, Lois Gunden was another MCC worker who served alongside Henry and Bea in France. In fact, Lois was the third MCC worker, in addition to Bea and Henry, interned in Baden-Baden’s Brenner Park Hotel. A number of years ago Lois Gunden’s niece wrote several articles recounting Lois’s brave service in France (Gunden 2013a, 2013b). Somewhat later Lois’s great-grandniece Amelia Davenport (2019) developed a website to portray the same.
In these sources we learn that Lois Gunden was twenty-six years old when she, along with Helen S. Penner and Joseph N. Byler (the Lyon-based MCC director we encountered earlier), crossed the Atlantic on the S.S. Excambion. It was October 1941: northern France was occupied by German forces; southern France was ruled by the German-controlled Vichy government.
Lois was bound for the Villa Saint Christophe, a twenty-room house (twelve rooms, according to one source) in Canet-Plage, in southern France. The home, located on the Mediterranean shore, right on the beach, in fact, now served as a home for roughly sixty refugee children and their caretakers.
When Lois and Helen Penner arrived, the children were primarily Spanish, the displaced victims of the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939). Most of their parents lived in the wretched conditions of the Rivesaltes refugee camp roughly 12 miles from the villa. As Vichy France increased its oppression of Jews to curry favor with their German backers, the Jewish population of the Rivesaltes camp increased, so that by the middle of 1941 Jews made up a full third of the camp population.
In early 1942, some Spanish refugees held in the Rivesaltes camp were allowed to return home, and some children left the Villa Saint Christophe with their parents. The rooms did not remain empty for long. Their places were quickly filled with new refugee children, who were increasingly Jews originally from Germany, Austria, Poland, and France.
Mary Jean Gunden explains:
By early July 1942, the Vichy government agreed to deliver for deportation up to 50,000 Jews. Those already in camps in unoccupied Vichy France, such as Rivesaltes, were deported to Drancy, a transit camp in Occupied France. From Drancy, they were deported to Auschwitz. Mary Elmes [an Irish colleague] visited Lois at the Villa on Aug. 9, 1942. Lois wrote, “Mary informed me about return of Polish and German Jews to Poland, where death by starvation awaits them.” In the deportations of August, September and early October 1942, if children under the age of 16 were not in the camps with a parent, they often weren’t searched out, particularly if French officials knew they could already meet their quota for the scheduled transports. Lois now understood the importance of moving as many Jewish children out of the camps and into the Villa as possible. (Gunden 2013b)
That last sentence is key: Lois and the other workers sought to move as many Jewish children as possible out of Rivesaltes and similar camps, so those children would not be sent to the death camps in Germany. According to the Yad Vashem database (here), Lois was responsible for saving the lives of at least nine children in the last half of 1942.
In November 1942, she traveled to Lyon to witness the wedding of Henry and Bea. Readers will recall that this was precisely the time that German forces occupied Vichy France. “Unable to return to the Villa, Lois worked with Henry to provide an operating plan so that existing staff could continue to care for the children. The staff moved the children several months later, when German occupiers requisitioned the Villa” (Gunden 2013b). Then, early in 1943, as we learned earlier, Lois, Bea, and Henry were taken into custody and held in the Baden-Baden hotel for a year, before returning to the United States.
It was because of Lois’s courageous and compassionate actions that Yad Vashem: The World Holocaust Remembrance Center honored her in 2013 as one of the Righteous among the Nations. At that time, Lois was only the fifth citizen of the United States to receive this great honor. I encourage everyone interested in Lois’s story to read all the sources below.
As interesting and consequential as Lois’s story is, our interest in her was prompted by the fact that she was a colleague of Henry and Bea’s. Their stories intersected and were intertwined with hers. From her story we can learn additional details about Bea and Henry.
For example, we gain a hint of when Henry began his MCC service in France when Mary Jean Gunden (2013b) writes:
Lois Gunden and Helen Penner began work at Villa St. Christophe on Oct. 22. Joseph Byler went on to Lyon, about 300 miles north, where he relieved Jesse Hoover as the director of the small MCC operation in France. Also working from the Lyon office was Henry Buller, who had already been serving for eight months.
If this information is correct, Henry began his MCC assignment in February 1941 or thereabouts.
The same article confirms the identification of Beata in Joseph Byler’s journals (see here) as Bea when it reports that “Lois had gone to Lyon to witness the wedding of Henry Buller and Beata Rosenthal, an assistant in the MCC Lyon office.” Apparently Bea was known to her colleagues as Beata, which bears a striking similarity to her birth name, Berta. Whether she went by Beata to obscure her Jewish identity or because Beata was her usual nickname is unknown.
Finally, the 2013b article provides exact dates and details for the trio’s internment and return to the United States a year later:
Lois and the Bullers were escorted by police to Mont-Dore on Jan. 27, 1943, and held in a hotel for several weeks before their transfer to Baden-Baden, Germany, as part of the official North American Diplomatic Group. After complex negotiations for a prisoner exchange, they arrived in New York City on the Gripsholm on March 15, 1944.
Works Cited
Davenport. Amelia. 2019. Lois Gunden: Sheltering Jewish Children in Peril during World War II in Vichy France. Website available here.
Elmes, Mary. Righteous among the Nations entry. Yad Vashem: The World Holocaust Remembrance Center. Available online here.
Gunden (Collins), Lois. Righteous among the Nations entry. Yad Vashem: The World Holocaust Remembrance Center. Available online here. See also the Women of Valor entry here.
Gunden, Mary Jean. 2013a. “Letters from Lois.” Goshen College News. Available online here.
———. 2013b. “Lois Gunden: A Righteous Gentile.” The Mennonite. 1 September. Available online here.
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